As Soft Power tourism & Influencer content, (even AI augmented) grows, the search for the "authentic" experience - real training, real fighting, "real" Muay Thai culture is going to intensify

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

While it has been a huge boon to Thailand's Muay Thai to have so much of the sport now directed towards Westerners and other non-Thais, and to have grown the international response after COVID hit the Thai tourist economy so hard, the shaping of the sport (its training and its fighting) towards the visitor is going to have an increased foreign demand for "authentic" Muay Thai, the sport trained and fought NOT for the Westerner. As influencer accounts grow, and gyms and promotions turn their gaze to the non-Thai, even as AI generated content starts to swarm social media feeds, the very core of what fighting is, the hard reality of training and fighting in a foreign way, in ways you cannot get at home, is ironically going to increase. If you travel 10,000 miles a significant portion of sincere students/fighters are going to want something that is not premade "for" them.

In this way I believe Thailand's Muay Thai holds a sort of very important signal against so much that is increasingly "fake" in globalizing culture, the draw to get away from everything that is simulated and algorithm-commodified, to experience things that change you in your soul, at a deep level of meaning. And, that Thailand's Muay Thai has a deeply rooted fighting culture still, a culture full of traditions and customs of fighting which have yet to be altered, positions Muay Thai in a powerful way. Yet, there is the very real possibility that it is adventure tourism pressure for the "authentic" which will bring value to that aspect, possibly altering or erasing important values within it...while still giving (government, and other) economic incentive to preserve these "non-tourism" subcultures and practices.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Here is a very small example of altered Muay Thai culture in Thailand that I sometimes think about...some gyms have "classes", in fact a LOT of gyms are starting to have "classes" and this just isn't a thing in Thailand's trad Muay Thai, and after the class participants all get in a line and "wai" to each other in different ways, sometimes like a soccer line. This is something I'd never seen or even heard about in a gym pre-COVID (I had seen it in Western gyms, if I recall). What is interesting is that if you've traveled thousands of miles and encountered this ritual you would really feel like you've come upon an authentic, perhaps old and common Thai gym custom...and would even perhaps bring it back to your home country.

I'm not even completely sure of the recent origin of this. It seems to have come out of the new idea of "classes" in a gym. There may be antecedents of import from Westerners in gyms who have helped shape those classes, or perhaps this is something that happens in Thai schools with kids (?), or it may come from Thais increasingly going to China as trainers, training lots of non-fighters, and then returning to Thailand. There does seem to be a lot of cross-pollination going on.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

On another level this kind of foreign influence on Thai culture is itself woven into Thai culture. A prime example is that the gendered particles that end sentences, "ka" and "crop" are a modern invention and not "traditionally" Thai, despite feeling VERY Thai. They were part of the gender edicts of the Thai dictator Plaek Phibunsongkhram who was attempting to pull Thai culture into line with Western gender values, edicts which also included legislating clothing differences between men and women. So, the very idea of "Thainess" itself is quite interwoven.

 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

The question of a pursuit of authenticity in Muay Thai by adventure tourists is different than other pursuits of cultural authenticity by tourism, I believe, in the sense that the coming demand for "authentic" experiences from MT tourism isn't the same for instance as tourist seeking "authentic" Thai cuisine. There may be some overlap, but due to the nature of fighting and the deeper motivations to travel to train and fight, there is more at stake than a sort of connoisseurship, or exploratory, learning experiences of "the foreign". Fighting involves another layer of personal identity and challenges core affects which lie beyond other legitimate travel transformations.